Movie Studios Lose Key Piracy Case Against Australian ISP

Hollywood studios have lost a case against Australian Internet service provider iiNet. U.S. and Australian studios sued iiNet in a federal court in 2010 for allowing their users to download pirated movies using BitTorrent on their watch (the studios lost). The studios hoped this high court appeal would be a turning point in the movie industry's fight against piracy—if they got iiNet to take responsibility for illegal downloads on their service, they could pressure other ISPs to play a bigger role in stemming pirated downloads on the weight of this precedent. However, others feared it would give ISPs undue power to cut access to their users. The Australian court ruled yesterday that ISPs were not liable for copyright infringement, and, that iiNet did not have direct power to control how users used BitTorrent, other than the indirect power they had to terminate their subscription completely.

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